Steven Waldman, the president and co-founder of Report for America, connects the dots between the local news crisis, the "financialization" of newspaper ownership, and the spread of disinformation on social media. Brian Stelter also asks Waldman about the rash of recent news about the news industry, including the international implications of the Australian proposal to have tech platforms pay publishers for news, and a hedge fund’s bid to buy Tribune Publishing. Waldman says the decline of local news coverage is "catastrophic for democracy," and proposes some solutions, including tax credits and nonprofit ownership models. "In the scale of the amount of philanthropic resources that are out there... it's actually inexpensive to fix, and yet the consequences of what's happening are so severe," he says.
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